If you want to go to a #manel or a #YAMMM check out Cold Spring Harbor Asia meetings - where men get to speak about stuff

So the first thing I did was to look at the gender ratio of speakers. I dug into each person listed here as much as a I could and attempted to infer what their gender is. I realize this is fraught with problems and have written about this previously. So as much as possible I looked for what pronouns were used to describe these people before infer their possible gender. I was unable to get any clear gendered pronouns for one person but the others I think I got enough evidence to make a hypothesis. I colored those I inferred to be male in yellow and those I inferred to be female in green.

Organizers

Dusko Ehrlich, INRA, France

Jack Gilbert, University of Chicago, USA

Nan Qin, Zhejiang University, China

Ting Zhu, Tsinghua University, China

Keynote Speakers:

Dusko Ehrlich, INRA, France

Jack Gilbert, University of Chicago, USA

Invited Speakers:

Christopher Carr , Massachusetts Institute of Technology , USA

Yehuda Cohen , Nanyang Technological University , SINGAPORE

Alana Firl , University of California, Davis , USA

Andrew Holmes , University of Sydney , AUSTRALIA

George Kowalchuk , Utrecht University , NETHERLANDS

Shuangjiang Liu , Institute of Microbiology, CAS , CHINA

Nan Qin , Zhejiang University , CHINA

Jacques Ravel , University of Maryland , USA

Peter Turnbaugh , University of California, San Francisco , USA

George Weinstock , Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine , USA

Paul Wilmes , University of Luxembourg , LUXEMBOURG

Gary Wu , University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine , USA

Ruifu Yang, Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, CHINA

Yunsheng Yang , Chinese PLA General Hospital , CHINA

Jun Yu , The Chinese University of Hong Kong , CHINA

Yu-Zhong Zhang , Shandong University , CHINA

Liping Zhao, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, CHINA

Jizhong Zhou , University of Oklahoma, USA

Ting Zhu , Tsinghua University , CHINA

Thus of the speakers (keynotes and invited) I infer a ratio of 18 men to 2 women (and one unknown). So that is 10% women. Not remotely representative of the gender in the general area of microbial communities.

I note - this whole thing saddens me even more because one of the invited female speakers is Alana Firl, who is a post doc at UC Davis jointly working in my lab and Sundar's lab. She is completely awesome and brilliant. But this meeting? Well, it is a manel (a panel of mostly men). A YAMMM (yet another mostly male meeting). And a disappointment.

So I decided to see if maybe it was just this meeting in the CSHL Asia series and if others were all OK. So I went to their list of past meetings and looked at just the keynote speakers.